A note on w3school: it used to be terrible because there were many mistakes and falsehoods in there that they refused to fix. But they've change, it is now quite decent. I still wouldn't rely on it for higher level javascript/web development info though, its a good site for CSS and HTML stuff.

I vote for Node.JS + AngularJS, even as a long time Java web developer, but its a learning curve that is almost impossible to breach with only the help of the internet; information is just so fragmented and over-simplified. Luckily this year there is an explosion of good and up to date AngularJS books either just out or just around the corner. The older books I've read (Pro AngularJS, the NG-book) are at best "decent".

I've barely skimmed this. The notion that "if you smart enough and apply yourself" then you can become excellent/good or even merely competent at any technical activity is rubbish. I know brilliant people who've spent massive amounts of time programming that pretty much suck. So it goes.

It is also rubbish to completely dismiss it because you know people who don't apply. The only thing that's rubbish is making it black & white.

Yeah I used to think making all the low-level stuff myself was fun too. Then its really "yours", right?

Eventually you'll change your mind and you'll focus on the high level stuff and gladly reuse tools, frameworks and APIs for the low level bits and bops. That way you actually get things done in stead of having to waste your time not only re-inventing the wheel but also maintaining it.

I can also relate to that. I was lucky enough that an old classmate got me into a company where I became a junior Java programmer (which switched me from hating Java to loving it), or else I would have stuck in shady PHP development companies that rise and crumble by the minute and would probably have ended up flushing out of IT.

If that made my life worse or better, I can't really know though. I live a good life money-wise but I do feel a bit like what I do is a fart in the wind.

Not mountain biking, but I enjoy dirt biking, but haven't since Feb '13 as I fractured some vertebrae and my motorbike is still bent.

How well did it heal? My shoulder still goes all stiff.

It will probably remain that way for a long time if I allow myself to be the bringer of bad news. I broke my ankle end of January last year, needed surgery. Now a year later my ankle still "feels" different. A little stiffness here, some collection of fluid if I don't move it for extended periods of time... I attribute that mostly to there being a winter in between in which I did not walk as much, now that I'm out doing 10+km walks, it slowly starts to turn into a "normal" ankle again.

Be careful with that shoulder; too many people get a locked up shoulder because something happened to it and they start to move and use it differently to compensate. It sucks when that happens as rehabilitation is usually very painful and takes months. Better do daily exercises.

Actually it turns out learning (or maybe teaching...) programming is not quite as simple as most other subjects. It has one of the highest rates of failure of any "science" discipline at university. I seem to recall that about 66% of students who started a degree course in programming simply could not grasp the subject, at all, and failed. This is a marked difference from almost all other science subjects.

Actually I was one of them, I just couldn't fathom it in the slightest and got the worst grades ever. I didn't like it at all.

Until one of my best friends in the same class, who had already been programming basic at age 8, started to make games and I realized "crap... I can become a game developer!". At that point it all flipped around and within a year I was known in the hallways as "that guy that is incredibly good at programming". Of course I didn't end up becoming a professional game programmer because I "couldn't" at the time.

Nowadays when I spot someone who is struggling to find programming entertaining, I advise to create little games. How quickly it turns around only because you start to apply it towards something fun.

Reading that whole article, I agree with the author. Just like OP, I have known friends who simply just don't "get it". They tried, I explained as best as I could, and they can't see the pattern, they can't make the connection. So yes, not everybody can make games because, as I also agree wholeheartedly with Riven, not everyone has the aptitude and level of intelligence for it.

Also theagentd, that's just perfect, and the cosplay for that Battle Bunny Riven is always the best

I mostly agree with that, but I side with the "intelligence/IQ does not matter" camp. Its about what you want, not about what you can or can't do. Example: I can learn Spanish. But when I got the course material, I realized that I really, really, really didn't want to invest all that time and effort. So that makes it that I "can't" learn Spanish regardless of how well my brain works. I learned Ruby on Rails in under two weeks because I *wanted* to learn it (at the time).

Some people like to build games, some people like to build engines. Some people only like to play games. Good thing too.

Haha that's cold. I think I'll stick to tea, that's a bitter taste i can take.

Try drinking black tea and leaving it in the water too long first. Powerful enough to break teeth.

I drink both - some coffee in the morning (more as a social thing than really for the taste, filthy machine coffee) and in the afternoon I switch to tea; one black tea and for the rest green or red tea. Other than that I drink a liter of water to flush all the poison out.

but you dont aim in dark souls. maybe once in a blue moon with the bow you go into first person aiming

Indeed and the fun part about bow aiming is that you do that carefully, not in the blink of an eye. A controller helps with that too because it allows you to adjust really slowly without having to actually physically move anything; rather you just slightly nudge the stick and keep it in place. If you have to do that with a mouse its all depending on the sensitivity of the mouse, how steady your hand is, how clean your mouse/pad is, etc. etc. Too much room for error.

But a fast paced FPS on the other hand... I don't know how people can play that with a controller. I tried to play Borderlands 2 like that, the only thing I could do was running around drunk while missing absolutely every shot. Madness.

You can return the game, or you can do yourself a big favor and get the controller. I went down the latter path and I've not stopped kicking myself for not doing that sooner. It not only improves how certain types of game play, I do believe it is simply a must for games which you will play for long intervals. I always ended up with cramps in my hands while playing Skyrim, now that I do that with a controller the game not only plays like a joy but I can just play it in the most relaxed posture ever; sitting up straight with my hands resting on my lap.

If you really can't figure out a simple game to use, are you sure you're ready to teach?

That's a decent reality check, but I'll assume the answer is "yes", or "no but I can't back out of this".

I wonder more: what is it that you want the people to learn from your demonstration? That creating games involves writing code? I'm sure they already know that. I'd rather focus on specific topics in stead of "the writing of a game". And that what you actually see would be the most logical choice for me: the basics of computer graphics and making stuff move and animate. That can already be an evening filling show since you can fill entire books on the subject.

Do you think the OpenGL would help you learn how to do things you wouldn't otherwise know how to do? Is it worth knowing?

Knowledge is everything. There is never a reason not to learn something, any piece of the puzzle you add to your knowledge base ultimately leads to a better understanding of the beast you're trying to tame.

Its more a question of WHEN to learn it. If you want to do only 2D games then you don't really have a reason to learn it when you have LibGDX - not yet anyway. It starts to become interesting to learn computer graphics theory and OpenGL when you want to go a little further than the bare basics, applying graphical effects and doing transformations and such.

I'm re-learning Javascript to do modern front-end web development (I caved...). As a Java developer I basically have to let go of almost everything I know, its THAT different.

You can do some OO (classes really) in Javascript but that's not how it is intended to be used. You rather work with prototyping. That's an interesting concept to grasp, I had real difficulty letting go of my OO roots but when I did I wasn't disgusted. I have learned to drop my hate for Javascript, its not as poor anymore as I thought it was.

I've also learned to love Google Chrome in that respect (being a pigheaded Firefox user until recently), its web developer tools and especially the javascript debugger are just excellent.

...and just an observation: why does everyone seem to want to form teams these days? You can accomplish vast amounts just on your own. Much more than you'll probably achieve with even two people. Every extra person you add to a team wastes a significant % of time to communications overhead. If there's anyone you really need to find, it's an artist.

Cas

Working alone is fine but if you do it for years it gets REALLY old. That would be a reason for me to go looking for other people.

A two-headed team, its perfection in my eyes. You don't need to juggle with responsibilities yet you're not alone.

Actually what I generally tend to to is to grow development time exponentially. Some days I just tend to be full of energy and cool new ideas. Those are bad days. On those days a nice simple game turns into some unfinishable monster of a game.

Interesting point of view. Basically being too creative is bad for finishing stuff.

I guess that's where team work comes in. If you're in a creative mood you should be in the role of creative director and apply your energy to a design for a future game, if you're in a less creative mood you're the developer for the day to work on the game in progress

Common sense, are you an idiot? The chance that wen u go up to someone in the street and ask them how to run a java application through command line the chance of them getting it right is very very slim

Okay I had to think about that one, but I get it now. Very clever! Common sense is indeed not what you want, you want uncommon sense

I had that problem; its triggered by the fact that programming is and remains hard; you cannot focus on one thing at a time because sooner or later that one thing is going to depend on other things to exist before you can even test or run it. You can't test legs without having a torso as it were.

There is but one true solution in my experience: proper code design. If you know the ecosystem up front (and it can be as simple as drawing up a simple high level diagram of all the different components), you can design placeholders/mock implementations so you CAN focus on one specific cog in the machine and still try it out, if necessary by giving it a spin by hand as it were.

Good luck with humiliating someone anonymous on the internet. Only thing to do about it is to ignore them silently and if their posts break the rules of the given forum, delete them and ban the user.

Generally if I fall into temptation, I do it by getting into a huge comedy act at the expense of the troll with everyone else responding in there while utterly ignoring any post the troll is making. Good fun but it requires some careful planning to not give the troll any kind of reason to think he/she has made any kind of impact.

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